Four short links: 22 July 2010

Boomerang — a piece of javascript that you add to your web pages, where it measures the performance of your website from your end user’s point of view. It has the ability to send this data back to your server for further analysis. With boomerang, you find out exactly how fast your users think your site is. From Yahoo!. (via Matt Biddulph)

Ten of the Greatest Maps that Changed the World (Daily Mail) — Head of Map Collections at the British Library has a list of cartographic coolness. Businessman Charles Booth was sceptical about a claim in 1885 that a quarter of Londoners lived in extreme poverty, so he employed people to investigate. They found the true figure was 30 per cent. The findings were entered onto a ‘Master Map’ using seven colour categories, from black for ‘Lowest class, semi-criminal’ to gold for wealthy. The authorities were terrified into action, and the first council houses were built soon afterwards. (via Flowing Data)

Open Web Analytics — provides a generic set of PHP and HTTP APIs that application developers can use to integrate web analytics into any application. The Framework also has built-in support for popular web applications such as WordPress and MediaWiki. (open source)

Aris Games — Over the last two years, a group of researchers here at the University of Wisconsin’s Games, Learning and Society research group have been experimenting with making mobile games that teach. Along the way, we have developed an open tool for creating these mobile games. Our goal is now is to provide educators who want to use place based / inquiry / narrative / gaming activities in their curriculum with a tool that can help them build it. The ARIS engine allows game designers to place virtual items, characters and pages in physical space using the iPhone’s GPS or a little barcode that can be placed on a wall or near an object. By giving the players a story and a number of quests, games can be built that involve a mix of physical and virtual activities.